Rising indie artist Windser (Jordan Topf) has shared the opening track and lead single of his upcoming debut, “Abandon.” A deeply personal and powerful song born from childhood trauma, with Windser’s Topf recounting a pivotal moment in his life when his father left him alone in a hotel room in Costa Rica at just seven years old. The painful memory resurfaced through recent therapy sessions, ultimately guiding Topf toward healing and self-discovery.
“‘Abandon’ is a diary entry of a song about when I was 7 years old and I was left alone in a hotel room for 24 hours in Costa Rica by my father as he rode off on a vintage motorcycle with a woman who was serving as a captain in the Navy. Chasing some fleeting feeling of youth or lust for life. I had never sat with this experience until recently, maybe I was too young to understand what it meant as a kid. Maybe it meant he always had one foot in one foot out the door with our relationship. It took me writing this song to truly process that maybe I never really knew him all too well. That his love for me was inhibited by desire. Maybe there was a dark side that he never wished for me to understand. This song marked a new way of writing I call “improvised feeling”. Building a musical bed and then freestyling melodies and lyrics over it as an emotional response to the sound of the music. It felt incredibly healing to tell this story, because line by line it is autobiographical. But the feeling is universal.” – Jordan Topf (Windser)
This release follows the announcement of his highly anticipated self-titled debut album, arriving May 16th via Bright Antenna Records. Windser was co-produced by Topf, Matias Tellez (Girl in Red, Sondre Lerche) and Jon Gilbert (Mt. Joy, Flipturn) at John Congleton’s Los Angeles studio, Animal Rites, and features a cast of top-tier musicians, including Dan Bailey (Father John Misty) and Adam Christgau (Tegan & Sara, Troye Sivan, Sia) on drums, Daniel Rhine (Phoebe Bridgers) on bass, Harrison Whitford (Phoebe Bridgers) on guitar, and Jerry Borge (Ziggy Marley, Jackson Browne, Dave Stewart) on keys. Each track was built from organic, instinctual collaboration, capturing a visceral, in-the-moment energy that defines the record’s sound.
As a veteran of other bands and a former tourmate of the likes of Portugal. The Man and alt-J, Topf has proven himself masterfully capable of translating those deep emotional moments in grand indie rock scale. While Topf wrote methodically for his previous EP and singles, here he laid down an atmospheric, psychedelic groove with Radiohead-esque affected guitars, and then let the verses tumble out of his mouth.
What do you think of Windser’s “Abandon”?
